Jason Segal as author David Foster Wallace
“END OF THE TOUR” My rating: A-
106 minutes | MPAA rating: R
“End of the Tour” could not be more out of fashion.
Mostly it’s just two guys talking.
Yet James Ponsoldt’s film is a sublimely moving experience, a two-handed mini-drama woven from the threads of ambition and mortality.
What’s more, it allows Jason Segal — usually a shambling funny man — to give the sort of performance that earns Oscar nominations and changes careers.
Based on journalist David Lipsky’s memoir of several days spent on the book tour for David Foster Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest, the film embraces a subtlety and richness of character virtually absent from today’s short-attention-span cinema.
The film begins in 2008, when Lipsky learns of Wallace’s suicide. Then it jumps back to 1996 and the media frenzy over Infinite Jest, a 1,000-page novel that was less a story (though it was set in a dystopian near future) than it was about the experience of being David Foster Wallace.
Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg) is a Rolling Stone writer — and an unsuccessful novelist, that’s really important — chafing beneath assignments about boy bands. Snowed by Wallace’s just-published novel (Time magazine has since named it one of the 100 best English-language novels between 1923 and 2005) and arguing that “writers matter,” he convinces his magazine’s editors to let him accompany Wallace on the final leg of his book tour, a trip to the Twin Cities.
The two will spend a night at Wallace’s snowbound rural home outside Bloomington, Indiana (where he teaches literature at the university), then fly to Minnesota. There will be plenty of time to talk in cars, on planes and over meals.
The role of Lipsky certainly poses no great challenge for Eisenberg…a bit of Woody Allenish-neurosis and he’s good to go.
Segal, on the other hand, undergoes a rather startling transformation. It’s not just the round spectacles, lumberjack shirt and ever-present head bandana that are essential to the costume. What impresses is the way this comic actor has transformed himself into a sort of lumbering child-man, changing his bearings, his posture. Even his voice shifts into a flat Midwestern drone with just a touch of breathiness.
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